Category: humor

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

While we were out for a walk yesterday, we ran into someone walking her chocolate Labrador retriever. His name is Hunter and he had a tree branch longer than him in his jaws. He looked like he was having a great time gnawing on it and swinging it around.

I didn’t envy his owner when it came time to going home and taking it away from him.

Mostly younger dogs like to chew on old sticks and some say it might be a good idea to bring a chew toy along with you when you take a dog outside for a walk. It can be tough to persuade a dog to just let the stick go.

As a retired consultation-liaison psychiatrist, I sometimes compare myself to a dog who latches on to a stick and is reluctant to let it go. I’m an old dog that way and, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s a little hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

There are examples of this issue. I rarely go grocery shopping and I still have a lot to learn. I was not good about grocery shopping and other non-work-related chores when I was a doctor for about 28 years, counting residency. Medical school kept me pretty busy too.

Anyway, I went grocery shopping yesterday and I thought I did OK although I had to wander around quite a bit to find everything on my list. Sena doesn’t need a list. She pointed out that I got the unsalted butter—which she never buys. I wondered how I managed to pick up unsalted butter. I thought I was doing good to get the Great Value brand rather than the more expensive brand.

The package was blue instead of red. You mean I have to read the package?

I got a package of chicken breasts and congratulated myself on that. Sena said they were really thin and noticed that they included rib meat—which she normally doesn’t buy. That slipped by me.

I bought a lot of items that we needed; you know, things like milk, eggs, bread, nuclear weapons, etc. But I really didn’t get anything that you could actually make a bona fide meal out of in the sense of cooking something.

Well, I did get a couple of frozen pizzas. This brought the total of frozen pizzas in our freezer to a number I’m not willing to divulge at this time.

I had to maneuver around several shoppers who were filling orders for customers who ordered their groceries on line. I tried that a very few times and it’s more difficult than I thought.

When I got up to the cashier, I just stood there while she rang up my purchases, bagged them—and then she started to put the bags in my cart. She didn’t say anything but a tiny bell in my brain rang somewhere and it occurred to me that I was supposed to put the bags in the cart. I apologized and got to work right away when I noticed. I recalled that it was probably just that mistake that led to my leaving an item at the store the last time I shopped.

Sena went to the grocery store after I got home and returned with items that could be used in menus. I think that is called meal planning.

But I did make dinner last night, meaning I reheated left-over chili and chopped up some vegetables for salads. Oh, and I got the saltines out for the bread group.

Sena is still trying to coax me to let go of the stick.

About Those Stages of Retirement

We got our new wall clock on the wall the other day. It got me to thinking about how I view time and other matters now that I’ve been retired for about two and a half years.

I actually tried to ease into retirement by getting a 3-year phased retirement contract. I thought that might help me get adjusted to not being a fire fighter as a consultation-liaison psychiatrist. I don’t know how helpful that was.

So, I looked up the stages of retirement on the web. There are slightly different versions but most of them have 5 stages:

  • Realization
  • Honeymoon
  • Disenchantment
  • Reorientation
  • Stability

I guess I’m somewhere at the tail end of disenchantment and the beginning of reorientation. I have to point out a few things about me and the clock on the wall to help get my point across.

When I was running around the hospital, I used to pay a lot of attention to the clock. One example is how I helped medical nurses and doctors diagnose and manage catatonia. That’s a complicated and potentially life-threatening condition linked to a lot of medical and psychiatric disorders. It can make people afflicted with it look like they have a primary mental illness and they can look and act spooky.

Most people with catatonia are mute and immobile. They could also have wild, purposeless agitation but the mute and immobile type is more common. I would recommend administering injectable medicine in the class of benzodiazepines, often lorazepam.

Often the catatonic person would wake up and start answering questions after being like a statue only minutes before the injection. I watched the clock very closely, and the nurse and I watched the vital signs even more closely.

The recovery from a catatonic state looks like a miracle, which often made me look like a hero—despite the fact I could not explain exactly the mechanism of how catatonic states begin or how injectable benzodiazepines work to reverse the state. In most situations, on the general medical and surgery wards, the cause was not infrequently a medical emergency.

That made retirement difficult. I often didn’t notice time passing when I was working. In fact, my job as a C-L psychiatrist was marked by a series of emergencies, hence the fire fighter feel the job held for me.

Somehow, interrupting my schedule (if you can call firefighting a schedule), didn’t help me very much in my adjustment to retirement.

Right from the start, I noticed I missed being a hero. By the time I got to the first stage, Realization, I was already part of the way into the Disenchantment stage. I don’t really recall the Honeymoon stage.

Time passed slowly after full retirement for me. Not even the phased retirement schedule prepared me for it. It was excruciating. I have never slept very well, but my insomnia got worse after retirement.

I had fleeting thoughts about returning to work, and that’s the surprising thing. You’d think I would have just dropped the whole retirement thing and get right back in the fire truck.

But I didn’t. Part of me knew that the job consumed me and burnout was a consequence. My focus on work did not help me be a good husband. On the other hand, retirement by itself didn’t help either.

It’s still hard, but not as difficult as it was at first. I would say that I’m somewhere between the latter part of Disenchantment and the beginning of Reorientation. I’m not anywhere near Stability.

I have replaced my schedule to some degree. Most days, I exercise and practice mindfulness meditation. I have also recently taken up juggling, as many of my readers know.

But any YouTube videos of me “cooking” are bogus. Sena takes video of me messing around making pizza and whatnot as if I know what I’m doing—but she’s giving me cues every step of the way. I’m allergic to kitchens and I probably always will be.

Anyway, I have a different relationship with the clock nowadays. I’m still hoping that I’ll evolve into somebody who knows how to manage not just retirement better, but a whole lot of things in a more adaptive way.

I sure hope so. According to some statistics, at my age I’ve got a limited time to improve. So, I need to get busy.

Lost Juggling Ball Found!

I lost one of my new juggling balls temporarily this morning while trying the behind the back throw. OK, so I dramatized the video a little. That’s because I got interrupted in the search to help Sena hang our new wall clock.

I had no idea where that ball was. I even considered a wormhole vortex opened up in my office—briefly.

But the place I finally found it was just where I’ve dropped juggling balls before—on one of my bookshelves.

New 12 Panel Juggling Balls!

I got one of the two new sets of juggling balls today. They are the Zeekio 12 panel, 67 mm, 130 gm balls, which are noticeably heavier and a little harder to do certain tricks with-like the behind the back throw.

I dropped them several times, so they are getting broken in very well!

Terry Trueblood Outing Today or How to Find Hearts Needing a Home

We had enough of bad news on the web, so we went out to Terry Trueblood Recreation Area today. Good things are happening around here, including what we found at Trueblood. Sena ordered some items last week. One is a clock, which we’ll hang somewhere and then not look at. Another is a chair that I will put together, and which will probably give me a reason to use up at least some of the oversupply of band aids.

The best deliveries, in my humble opinion, will be a couple of brand-new sets of juggling balls. One reason for buying them is that my other juggling balls are already starting to leak their millet fillings.

Millet is bird seed. I first noticed it on my hands, and then saw it on book shelves and my chair. I practice juggling every day, and see to it that they get banged up as much as possible, even if that happens to involve impacts with my head. Many juggling balls are stuffed with something: plastic pellets, sand, dandruff from extraterrestrials—no reason to avoid millet.

The new juggling balls will be bigger and heavier: a little over 2.5 inches in diameter and around 130 grams. I’ll probably knock myself unconscious dropping them on my head. One set of 3 will be as close to Iowa Hawkeye colors as I can get: black and yellow (which is what black and gold usually look like to me). The other set will be multicolored and have 12 panels. Balls covered with leather or other material have to be sewn shut and some say that the more panels, the more the impact will be spread, possibly reducing the risk for breakage. On the other hand, I can’t help wondering if there are more seams, wouldn’t it be more likely they’d be split when (not if) I drop them?

I’ll think about that later. We had the best time today at Trueblood. In fact, a lot of people were having a great time out there. The weather was fantastic; the temperature was in the fifties. One trail walker claimed she saw 16 bald eagles! I took this with a grain of salt, but then we saw at least a half dozen, though they were flying too high to get good photos. There were plenty of shore birds.

The best sightings were the quilted hearts hung on several trees. They are from an organization called “I Found A Quilted Heart” and you can learn more about the people who got this started at their web site www.ifoundaquiltedheart.com. Volunteers place the small quilted hearts in various places, often local parks. The sole purpose is to brighten your day. That beats the daily news any time.

What we didn’t know was that we could keep the quilted hearts we found. We saw 4 of them. We’re going to let others find them and share the joy.

Ugly Juggling So Far

I thought I’d make a video on the progress I’ve made so far in the last 4 months with ugly juggling. Man, it’s ugly; I’m still lunging and grabbing and making faces. But I’m also getting a real good workout.

Psychiatric Times recorded my After Hours video via Zoom this morning. It won’t look like my progress YouTube show at all, but it was a lot of fun. They’ll need to edit the thing because I talk too much. It’ll have to go in a queue after that, so I have no idea when it’ll be available.

I’ll keep you posted.

Thoughts on Regrets

I’ve been thinking about Dr. Moffic’s article on regret, posted on February 16, 2023 in Psychiatric Times.

I’ve dwelt on it long enough that I feel compelled to inject humor into the subject. It’s one of my many defenses.

There’s a quote from Men in Black 3 involving a short telephone conversation between Agent K and Agent J:

Agent K: Do you know the most destructive force in the universe?

Agent J: Sugar?

Agent K: Regret.

You could probably sense that joke coming. Whenever there is talk of regrets, I always recall maybe one or two remarkable episodes which led to lifelong regret. Because regret is pretty corrosive, as noted by Agent K, I need something to counter it.

My trouble is that I have many regrets. Am I so different in that regard?

Sometime in mid-career, a very important leader told me, frankly and calmly, “You’ll never be a scientist.”

Well, by then it was far too late for me to change life course. It was true; I’ve always been the rodeo clown, never the matador.

On the other hand, I know one thing I’ve never regretted and that’s my retirement. At least I think I haven’t regretted it. I have this recurring dream. It’s not every night, but often enough to make me wonder what I should do about it.

In the dream, I’m late for an exam or class and I fear I’m going to flunk. I look for the building where the exam is going to be held. I can never find it. Hallways appear and look vaguely familiar, but as I wander about looking for the bookstore or classroom or exam room, I feel like I’m in a maze, climbing stairs, almost like an Escher drawing.

That reminds me. Incidentally, several years ago, one of the medical students rotating on the psychiatry consult service drew a picture entitled “The Practical Psychosomaticist” which contained images of stairs running in different directions similar to an Escher drawing (see the featured image). It was really just her expression of how I got around the hospital. I avoided elevators and always took the stairs.

Anyway, I’m carrying several notebooks and loose papers keep falling out. I get lost in this jumble of halls and stairways, never finding my destination.

The dream is probably just me telling myself I’m failing at something in my waking life. It’s not like I need a dream to notify me.

This is a long way of saying I have many regrets, and that I may not know exactly how many. Some of them are less important than others. Take the “I’ll never be a scientist” theme. I’m not terribly broken up about it.

After all, rodeo clowns do pretty important things.

Jim on a Winning Streak on the Bigfoot Cribbage Board

Ever since we got the Bigfoot cribbage board, I’ve been winning. If you believe in lucky streaks, I’m on one. However, Sena wins most of the time when we play on the jumbo cribbage board.

Is it the Bigfoot cards? Is it the Bigfoot pajamas? Sena was so overwhelmed she put her house slippers on backwards.

My reward was to put together more knockdown furniture.

Big Wet Heavy Snow for Epic Snow Juggling!

Well, today’s snowstorm was a mix of fluffy as well as wet and heavy. The latter made for pretty good snowballs, which led to epic juggling on a windy day, snow blowing in my face while I juggled.

We had to clear the sidewalks and driveway first. I’m sure we got over half a foot of snow.

Sena shot the video while I tried to increase my throw count, which meant I had to make a lot of snowballs.

One clip showed a group of deer across the street. Neither one of us noticed them. I didn’t see them because I had my back to them and was concentrating on my juggling. What’s surprising is that Sena didn’t notice them either, even though they were clearly in the shot, trotting across the neighbor’s yard and across the street.

She was focused on my juggling too.

We made the YouTube video without music because we want you to count the throws along with me and hear our reactions.